The digital age has created ONE global city.
Since times of Uruk, the oldest city in history, all the way to recent times before the digital age some people lived in what the dictionary defines as cities. These were cities delineated by geographical boundaries. Business, politics, pop culture and most of the news happened in cities, more so in larger capital cities. People who lived in the city had unique traits added into their personalities, they tended to become more knowledgeable, skilled and open, more cosmopolitan we would say. The people of the city lived physically in a place that constantly exchanged information that would eventually reach newspapers and television broadcasts for the people in rural areas to learn about.
Since the digital age, this reality started changing and today we can see no more delineated boundaries. I work with very skilled and knowledgeable developers, designers and manufacturers from different places and many of them live in rural areas. They are as skilled and astute as any “city” person. Location is no longer a constraint. The digital world is the global city that connects every piece of information and every person connected to it.
This has revolutionized human habits and demographics that disrupt previous ways of understanding sociological patterns. For example, a political campaign used to be planned based on local demographics, genders, local beliefs, local hobbies and interests. This campaign would not be effective today(although many in the subject have still not realized it). Today you might find in a rural area electorate a racially mixed non-binary gender person whose bicultural parents met on match.com that learned about his/her/their new religion online, and supports a cricket team from another continent.
Many analysts define this as a consequence of globalization but that is not what I am talking about here. It’s about the digital connections that caused a broad rural-to-city mindset shift for the majority of the human population. This has implications for many things that until recently were given for granted. We live now inside one global city filled with city people and it should be treated accordingly.